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Pate of Foies Gras
Select a good-sized goose's fat liver and remove the gall with care, put the liver into a pan of boiling water to set, taking care that it does not boil, then take it out and let it cool. Put two tablespoonfuls of finely-chopped onions into a sautepan with a little rasped bacon and fry, but without allowing it to color. Cut the liver into large squares, put it into the pan with the onions and add eight ounces of raw truffles cut up into smaller squares or dice; sprinkle over a little salt and add a few spices to season. Place the pan over the fire for eight minutes or so, tossing it now and then, then take it from the fire and let the contents cool. Chop fine half a pound each of lean veal and fat bacon, mix in with them two or three tablespoonfuls of breadcrumbs soaked in milk and squeezed thoroughly dry, mince it up a little more and season with salt and pepper. Place this mince in a basin, add some trimmings of truffles and the fat liver also chopped very fine, and half a pound of lean ham cut into small dice or squares. Butter a hot pie mould, place it on buttered paper on a baking sheet, line it with short paste, put a layer of the mince at the bottom and sides, then fill it with a round flat of paste, decorate it, leave a hole in the center, brush it over with egg and bake for an hour and a half in a moderate oven. As soon as the paste begins to color place a piece of buttered paper over it. When it is done remove the top of the pie, wipe off as much of fat as possible, mask the contents with brown sauce reduced with Madeira and trimmings of truffles, and serve very hot.
This is a pâté en croûte in the full nineteenth-century manner: a raised pie, baked in a hinged mould, unmoulded from its lid at the table and finished with sauce. The hinge of the recipe is heat control on the liver, which is mostly fat and will render away to nothing if it is treated like meat.
- Setting the liverOscar is explicit that the water must not boil: the liver is only firmed, not cooked. Foie gras fat begins to render at low temperatures, usually given as somewhere between the high 80s and about 100F, so water held below a simmer is the intent. The same caution arguably applies to the eight-minute turn in the sautepan, though the recipe specifies only that the onions must not colour.
- Foie gras itselfA goose liver of the size meant here runs 1.5 to 2 lb. Duck foie gras, more common now, weighs about 1 to 1.5 lb and is firmer and less prone to melting. Note that sale of foie gras is restricted in some jurisdictions, California among them.
- Rasped baconBacon scraped or grated to a paste with the back of a knife, used as a cooking fat rather than as an ingredient you taste. A tablespoon of finely minced unsmoked fatback or pancetta does the same job; heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate.
- Raw trufflesEight ounces of fresh black truffle is a nineteenth-century luxury-hotel quantity and is now a several-hundred-dollar line item. Preserved winter truffle, or a much smaller quantity of fresh with some of its soaking liquor, is the realistic substitution. "Trimmings" means the peelings, kept back and used to flavour the sauce.
- Short paste for a raised pieThis is not a dessert short crust. Pâté doughs typically carry lard or butter at something like a third to a half the weight of the flour, plus egg, and must be stiff enough to stand against the mould and hold sauce afterwards. The pie mould can be replaced by a straight-sided loaf tin lined with paste.
- The chimneyThe hole left in the centre of the lid vents steam. Roll a small collar of foil or paper for it so it does not close as the crust rises.
- OvenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Ninety minutes is what the recipe specifies for a mould of this size; the buttered paper laid over the top once it colours does the work of a foil tent. The forcemeat of veal, ham and bacon should reach 160F at the centre.
- The finishBrown sauce reduced with Madeira is in effect a Madeira sauce on a reduced brown-sauce base. The recipe has the top of the pie removed, the surface fat blotted, and the contents then masked with the sauce. Serving hot is deliberate — the cold, jellied pâté en croûte is a different dish.
- YieldA mould built on half a pound each of veal and bacon plus the liver and ham should feed roughly twelve to sixteen as a course; the recipe does not say how it is portioned.
Pâté de foie gras in a crust is generally traced to Strasbourg in the 1780s, where the cook Jean-Pierre Clause is traditionally credited with the pie that made the city's name synonymous with fattened goose liver; the attribution is repeated everywhere but rests on thin documentation. By the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his book in 1896, the dish had become one of the standard proofs of a great hotel kitchen — expensive in materials, unforgiving in execution, and impressive when the lid came off in the dining room. Its presence in the Waldorf's pages says a good deal about what New York money expected of French cooking at the turn of the century: not novelty, but the classical Escoffier-era repertoire executed without shortcuts. The instruction to serve it very hot places it firmly as a service dish rather than the cold buffet terrine most readers know today.